


Sedna's Mercy

by ArachneJericho



Series: Seal Tales: Beginnings [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Inuit Mythology - Freeform, Kidnapping, Original Work - Seal Tales, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1356652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArachneJericho/pseuds/ArachneJericho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he had a name, he had the sea and the ice. His people were the seals that the Inuit call <em>nattit</em>, and they lived their lives under the pack ice, dining on fish and squid. The people were also known among their greater kin as the Lone People, for they never congregate in rookeries, living out their lives in ones and twos. Many of the Lone People would be more than satisfied with a solitary existence, if it weren’t for the mating season.</p><p>He was not like the others, for he craved more than a lonely existence in the icy seas, an urge that marked him as a shaman of the Lone People. Shamans have always existed among all the peoples, both of the land and of the sea, but they are never celebrated by the Lone People, who have no need of them. Such a potential shaman of the Lone People has a hard road ahead of them, for if they would learn their art, they must do so from another people. If they are lucky, their nearer cousins, the Heavy-Jawed People, will teach them; if they are unlucky, they must attempt to appease more dangerous relatives, like the Tusked People, or to cross language barriers, as with the Wise Ones that sing in the deeps.</p><p>The Hunting People are not to be thought of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Curiosity Killed the Seal

Before he had a name, he had the sea and the ice. His people were the seals that the Inuit call _nattit_ , and they lived their lives under the pack ice, dining on fish and squid. The people were also known among their greater kin as the Lone People, for they never congregate in rookeries, living out their lives in ones and twos. Many of the Lone People would be more than satisfied with a solitary existence, if it weren’t for the mating season.

He was not like the others, for he craved more than a lonely existence in the icy seas, an urge that marked him as a shaman of the Lone People. Shamans have always existed among all the peoples, both of the land and of the sea, but they are never celebrated by the Lone People, who have no need of them. Such a potential shaman of the Lone People has a hard road ahead of them, for if they would learn their art, they must do so from another people. If they are lucky, their nearer cousins, the Heavy-Jawed People, will teach them; if they are unlucky, they must attempt to appease more dangerous relatives, like the Tusked People, or to cross language barriers, as with the Wise Ones that sing in the deeps.

The Hunting People are not to be thought of.

Unlike his ancestors, he found no willing teachers in the Arctic, and so struck out for more distant waters.

One night, as he plowed through unfamiliar seas, warmer than he was used to (which is still cold to us indeed), he found a boat. It was neither the kayak nor the umiak of the Inuit, but an English fishing boat that pushed itself slowly along the waves. Laughing People had surrounded the vessel, chortling, jumping from the water as was their way near humans. The _nattiq_ stared, amazed at seeing an entire pod of the near-mythical people his mother had told him about. They barely acknowledged his presence, seemingly as rude as her late-night tales would have them. 

Curious about the strange boat as well, he managed to swim below the Laughing People and up, ending parallel to its painted wooden hull. He noted that the designs were familiar to him out of the memory shared by all of the peoples of the sea, for all of them were born from Sedna’s fingers, and she remembers well, if not always fondly, the Inuit. In red, teal, white, and black was outlined the abstract shape of a loon’s head across the bow.

The humans on the craft were making noises, which do not travel well beneath the waves, and his curiosity overcame his common sense to be wary of humankind. He lifted his head above the water to listen more clearly to their speech. They did not speak any dialect of Inuktitut, however, and the _nattiq_ was just about to lose interest and dive below once more when the nets closed on him. He was dragged onto the deck, the boat rocking alarmingly. The Laughing People sensed something was wrong, but did not assist the _nattiq_ , though they were no longer laughing. 

The shock of capture dazed the _nattiq_ for a moment, which was enough for two burly humans to grab hold of his body and flatten him against the deck, belly upwards. He fought then, twisting and trying to bite; a third pair of hands then held his head and jaws still. The terror clutching him made it difficult to hear the lone voice chanting above the human faces that looked down upon him, all pale like the underbellies of deep sea albacore. Each minute that passed brought with it more nausea, as if he had eaten something particularly rotten or even poisonous. Soon the humans no longer had to hold him down to the deck; he was thoroughly incapacitated. 

As he twitched in queasiness, his vision slipping away, another human, tall and broad of shoulder, approached with a long skinning knife, and drove the point into his throat, then moved the blade down his belly, slicing through skin and blubber, all the way to his tail. Two pale hands dug into the long wound and shoved the edges apart. The deck became slippery with blood. 

The _nattiq_ found that he could see again. He felt strangely naked and unusually cold, but the nausea had stopped. A hand grabbed his front flipper, which had developed fingers and become much smaller, and dragged him up onto two feet at the end of spindly legs. Human legs. Long, black hair, sticky with blood, clung to his cheeks and shoulders and breasts. He looked down at the deck and saw his own eyes, empty and dead. Between his toes oozed gore, and he screamed. The broad-shouldered man enveloped him and pulled him away from the skin. 

"You're mine, now," he said, in English that the _nattiq_ would only understand a month later after tutoring. Up close, his blue eyes gleamed with triumph, and the _nattiq_ was terrified. "The perfect bride for the Lord of the Storm." 

The _nattiq_ bit at his cheek. The man squealed like something dying and shoved him away. The _nattiq_ slipped and fell, strangely dull teeth in an unnaturally small mouth only scraping his captor's skin. 

"Tranquilise her and put her away below decks," said the man.


	2. Humanity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Months later, the first words the nattiq said to his husband were, "Your countenance is like unto the pale vomit of a seagull feeding its chicks."

Months later, the first words the nattiq said to his husband were, "Your countenance is like unto the pale vomit of a seagull feeding its chicks."

His husband looked sharply at the nattiq's tutor in English, who in turn looked quite shocked. "I had no idea she would say that, Lord Chamber-Hill. Perhaps she means it as a compliment, yes, a compliment, from her experiences at sea as a member of a, yes, a primitive people. After all, their sentiments would be shocking, of course, yes, to ours. Yes. Um." 

Chamber-Hill had never told anyone of his house of the wherewithall he had gotten his bride. "You will teach Sanna the proper etiquette of the English woman, then. I'm willing to be understanding, up to a point." 

The nattiq, who had a rather difficult time thinking of himself having a human name, much less one that called back to the sea power that had created the peoples of the sea, continued, "If what I said caused offense, then pleased I am, for it was offense I intended to make."

Lord Richard Chamber-Hill frowned, and then his brows knit as anger overtook his pale countenance. The tutor stammered the beginnings of his apologies, but Chamber-Hill's glare stamped him into silence. 

After an awkward pause, Chamber-Hill spoke. "I want you to see something, Sanna." He swept up from the study chair, all elegance and grace in his lines, and put an arm around the nattiq's shoulders, leading him into the secret room behind a bookcase. The room was almost as big as the great hall, and from its walls hung the heads of northern animal trophies. Where another English noble might have hung the head of a great-antlered moose or toothy lion, instead hung the heads of great-tusked walrus and a polar bear caught in mid-roar. There were the heads of seals as well, and the pelt of one of the Lone People. The spectacle always made the nattiq sick to his stomach to see, but he tried to act as if nothing bothered him at all. 

Stretched upon a wooden frame mounted upon the far wall was his own pelt. He stilled the longing in his soul for it. 

Chamber-Hill stepped up to the small dais and began to unhook the skin from its moorings. "Halverman, please light the fire." 

The nattiq thought of saying, "No, you can't!" Or perhaps, "You fiend, you orca, you shark." Or even leaping for his skin. But the bruises under his long sleeves and beneath his skirt had taught him caution about Chamber-Hill. 

So he laid down his pride instead. "Please. Don't do it. You are right, I need to gentle my tongue." 

Chamber-Hill stopped as Halverman stoked the fire. "Will you tell me that you never meant to insult me?" 

"It was merely spirits, my Lord. I never meant to cause offense." The nattiq's eyes fixed upon his skin, willing that it be saved somehow by his back-pedaling and his spiritual begging. But his expression was one of utter contriteness. 

Chamber-Hill unhooked the skin, folding it across his arm, and swept towards the nattiq. "Well, well," said Chamber-Hill after examining the nattiq's face closely. "You lie impressively well. If I hadn't heard your words myself I would almost think you had been joking. Almost." The room began to heat from the growing fire's warmth from the grandiose hearth.

"But to tell the truth, I had always meant to do this." And Chamber-Hill tossed the skin into the fire. 

The nattiq braced himself for pain, but found none. In a way, the lack of reaction from his body was somehow worse than what he imagined searing pain from a brand might be like. Perhaps it had not been his skin after all? He looked at Chamber-Hill, and sickened visibly at the sight of the grin on his face. 

"I have broken you from what you once were," he said, taking the nattiq's hand and kissing it mockingly. "You are truly human, now." 

The nattiq couldn't help himself. He fled the room, tears filling his brown eyes, which were no longer the deep black ones of a Lone Person.


	3. Futures Denied

Every morning, the nattiq (he refused to think of himself as _Sanna_, a name he was certain held ill omen for one of the People, as one of the names of their vengeful mother) stared into the mirror as his maid brushed out his black hair. Now his eyes were no longer black edge-to-edge like one of the People, but human, brown irises with round pupils and whites all around them, and their reflection made him sick to his stomach. Utterly alien. Human. 

How had his captor done this to him? His husband was a magic-worker, fancying himself a modern warlock, yes; but the nattiq was a shaman of the People. Like his ancestors in the distant past of the world, he could change into human shape when he felt willing (and he never had, and never would again) without the artifice of separation from his skin. Indeed, it made no sense to him that his magic could be concentrated into merely his skin. But the English warlock had done it, had turned him into one of the Skin People, another myth that had become all too shockingly real. 

And now he had no magic. He could never be a shaman again; that path had been closed to him the day his skin had been burned. 

As the days passed, he saw Lord Chamber-Hill less and less, and was glad of it in one way, but despaired of it in another. He was certain he was now a thing to be used by the warlock in some ritual or another, but what that might be, he had no idea, but still the thought made him shudder. As far as the nattiq could tell, the man held a certain contemptuous fascination with the culture of the Northern tribes of the People of the Land, ominous in its obsession. 

If he were still a shaman, he could speak to Sedna, the mother of the Sea Peoples, call to her, ask for supplication and escape from bondage. But he was stuck on land, impotent and awkward, parched by its dryness, and without magic. His husband was no fool; even divorced forever from magic, the nattiq was never left unattended, and never allowed to leave the mansion. 

After a month of mourning for a future that would never be, the nattiq began to plot revenge. Not against the staff, for the staff had been very kind to the nattiq in spite of, or perhaps because of, Lord Chamber-Hill's treatment of him and of them. Fear of losing their position and livelihood kept them from assisting him in an outright escape, but their pity allowed them the motivation to give him small favors and mercies. 

Over the months, his tutor, Philip Osmond, brought him books of English folklore and stories after learning his disposition towards the fanciful. Briefly the nattiq fantasized of stealing a Selkie skin and swimming away, but on further reflection the act seemed downright evil. The nattiq had not sunk that low. 

His maid, Mary, brought him trinkets of various sorts before she discovered his fondness for souvenirs of the deep waters, and then she obtained sea shells, tacky glitter globes, and a toy containing a liquid blue "ocean" with small flat Laughing People that swam when you tipped the container back and forth. The action soothed the nattiq somewhat, and he spent hours rocking it and trying to keep the memories of the sea fresh, though they faded every passing day. 

The cook, Harry, prepared fish meals, though he could not be convinced of the finer properties of raw herring and whitefish. Even cooked aquatic fare was better than nothing, and they seemed to fit his palette. The nattiq wondered at night, in his moments of deepest despair, whether raw seafood would actually make him ill, now that he was human. 

And Halverson, the man apparently without a first name, taught him about tea. The nattiq's clumsiness with fingers at meals earned him abuse from Lord Chamber-Hill. Halverson's tea rituals trained the nattiq, starting with stout-handled mugs, progressing to finer silver tea services, and eventually to bone china. Even preparing the tea itself trained litheness into fingers that had previously only known life as flippers, and the reward of liquids novel in color, smell, and taste. The deep reds of the somewhat bitter black teas, to the kelpish flavor of the lighter greens and whites, to the earthy tones of the pu-erhs, all fascinated the nattiq and even become a hobby. He could almost taste the ocean's bounty in them, if he concentrated his imagination. 

The staff would all be spared. The nattiq's ire was for Lord Chamber-Hill alone.

**Author's Note:**

> The Lone People: singular _nattiq_ , or Ringed Seals  
> The Heavy-Jawed People: singular _udjuk_ , or Bearded Seals  
> The Tusked People: singular _aiviq_ , or Walruses  
> The Hunting People: singular _arluq_ , or Orcas  
> The Wise Ones: the family of various whales  
> The Laughing People: Bottlenose Dolphins. Only the shamans of the Northernmost Sea Peoples know of them, for they almost never venture into polar waters.


End file.
